The Sound and the Fury Essays

One, a story about culture, class, family, and love laws, follows the lives of a pair of twins in Kerala, India as they learn one fateful December day how drastically "Things Can Change in a Day." The other, a story about suicide and incestual...

It is fitting to discuss the recollection of the past in an age advancing to an unknown futurity and whose memories are increasingly banished to the realm of the nostalgic or, even worse, obsolete. Thomas Pynchon and William Faulkner, in wildly...

Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say. I says you're lucky if her playing out of school is all that worries you. I says she ought to be down there in that kitchen right now, instead of up there in her room, gobbing paint on her face and waiting...

As Quentin Compson travels through the countryside with his college friends, the reality of the situation becomes terribly confused by memories and past feelings. After a little girl follows him for miles around town, his own sexuality reaches the...

William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury deals with man's relationship with time and sequence. The complexities of the book, from its variety of narrators to the order of its chapters, support Faulkner's primary experimentation with time. But The...

In The Sound and the Fury, the fated Compson family is a portrayal of both the declining old South and the new South that rose demonically out of its ruins. Through the Compsons, Faulkner personifies at once the mournful self-pity of a fallen...

I remember the first time I really heard classical music. As long as I can remember I have loved music, but growing up, no matter how many times my parents dragged me, kicking and screaming, to the symphony, or my piano teacher tried to teach me a...

In the postwar South, the relationships between men and women were beginning to shift. Gwendolyn Chabrier writes, "While the prewar South was traditionally a patriarchy, at the time of the war and particularly afterwards, that paternal system was...

William Faulkner presents the story of Caddy in The Sound and the Fury in a unique and precise way by showing how her family views her. Caddy's life becomes the central conflict in the lives of the Compsons, and her story, paralleled with the...

In The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner draws attention to Benjy's ability to watch through his inability to speak. His character tends toward omniscience, as he constantly stumbles upon (or takes part in) various clandestine acts but does not...

In Faulkerâs The Sound and the Fury, Caddy, the central figure, is never given a voice. Instead, her character is revealed through the narratives of her three brothers. Since the novel is largely surrounded by the concept of alternating truths,...

A sense of 'authorial design' in William Faulkner's 'The Sound And The Fury' does not make itself apparent until the second section of the book, narrated by the suicidal Quentin, although the seeds of this design are planted in the earliest pages...

For Benjy and Quentin Compson, memory in "The Sound and the Fury" is a tool for discovering and escaping reality. Both brothers have trouble seeing the past as part of a chain linked to both the present and the future. Benjy does not recognize...

An air of doom and darkness hangs over the entirety of William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. Utilizing the negative aspects of the South that swirled around him, Faulkner skillfully molds a family--the Compsons--out of that life. Not only...

There is no such thing as a perfect family, or a perfect person for that matter, but the Compson family from Toni Morrison's The Sound and the Fury has endless problems. The Compson's situation becomes so tragic that it leads to anger, remorse,...

Adolescence is a confusing and vulnerable time in any young woman's life. Unfortunately, the sexual decisions one makes as an immature youth can set a dreary path for a woman's future. Unhealthy sexual lives such as these are displayed in Toni...

In "The Book of the Grosteques," the first story of his novel Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson introduces the concept of the “grotesque.” This concept sets up the following stories in the novel, and can also be seen in other modernist texts...

William Cuthbert Falkner started his life on September 25, 1897, in Mississippi. He was born into a prominent family, who owned banks and a railroad. Mammy Callie, his childhood nurse, was a major contributor to his works. The stories she would...

“Noah’s children had inherited the flood although they had not been there to see the deluge” (Go Down, Moses 276). This sense of doom follows through five of the major novels written by William Faulkner set in his mythic Yoknapatawpha County. Doom...

As difficult to read as William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury proves to be, there are still characteristics to the story that are obvious or obviously out of place. Arguably, just such a characteristic or character would be Mrs. Bland, mother...

In Faulkner’s novel The Sound and the Fury[1], time and the past appear as crucial but complex themes. As a novel constructed around past events which have taken place before the time of narration, the past seems to be very much alive within the...

Born in 1897 in Mississippi, William Faulkner knew black people as servants and laborers, not as equals. Yet, sharing the same space with blacks led him to a deeper understanding of their plight and circumstances. Despite his negative view of...

Regarded as the most prominent writer from the South, William Faulkner spent his entire writing career building stories that both speak of human nature and of the nature of his homeland. In Faulkner’s large volume of work, he goes about exploring...

The suicidal eldest, the special needs middle child, and the youngest, incapable of love: these are the three Compson brothers, each haunted by their own demons and howling for everything they have lost. In his novel The Sound and the Fury,...